Amarcord Criterion Collection :: Education by Design Store

Editorial Review
From moment to moment and shot by shot, Amarcord delivers more sheer pleasure than any other Federico Fellini movie. That's not to say it's his greatest film, or that anything in it rivals the emotional, lyrical, or metaphysical wallop of the finest passages in Nights of Cabiria, 8 1/2, La Strada, or even La Dolce Vita, the big early-'60s crossover hit that made the director king of the international film world. But Amarcord was the last clear triumph of Fellini's career, his prodigious gifts for phantasmagoria, amazing fluidity, and gregarious choreography all feeding an emotional core that caught at audiences' heartstrings and carried them away.

The title is supposed to mean "I remember," and the film is ostensibly a memory-dream-diary of life in the director's seaside hometown of Rimini during one year in the 1930s. But Fellini was an irrepressible showman who loved pulling the audience's collective chain, and Amarcord is no more straightforward as a recollection of his real adolescence than "amarcord" is a real word--Fellini made it up as a bit of pretend vernacular. So the strolling town historian who pops up occasionally to supply antiquarian footnotes directly to the camera more often than not gets pelted with snowballs from offscreen. Just as Nino Rota's (wonderful) music score recycles melodies from his scores for earlier Fellini masterworks, Fellini's movie is full of lyric ecstasies--spontaneous parades, comic ceremonies, eye-popping surrealist moments--that exist principally because that is what a Fellini movie is supposed to be like. There's no dominant story line, no individual character or player to be identified as the center of the film's swirling movement. Yet we do get to "know," and begin to cherish, literally dozens of goofy, eccentric, funny/sad creatures who have their distinct places in the continuum of Fellini's made-up town and reimagined Italy of a bygone era.

The era was, of course, that of Facsism. Fellini's take on Fascism here is anything but portentous; the giddy nationalism given voice occasionally by delirious crowds of townsfolk is no more sinister than the same crowd might have been in cheering on the local football team. In the movie's most famous set-piece, dozens of locals put out to sea in small boats to witness the passage of a fabulous ocean liner, the Rex, "the greatest construction of the regime." Waiting, they sleep--till suddenly the luminous (and entirely unreal) vision is towering above them, threatening to swamp them all. The moment is both ecstatic and terrifying. It's not the only one.

Customer Reviews

Fellini in second gear

2008-09-07
Federico Fellini's 1973 Amarcord is a film that has often been linked with Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexander as films by old men looking back on their youth. While this is true, in the main, the fact is that Amarcord has a loose narrative structure, in which the lives of many characters are detailed in comic vignettes, whereas Fanny & Alexander is a straight drama. The film that Amarcord shares a deeper affinity with is one which was obviously influenced by it; Woody Allen's grossly underrated and terrific Radio Days. Which of those two films is better is debatable, although Allen's film is tighter, shorter, and a bit deeper in characterization. Allen's opening classroom scenes in Annie Hall also owe a debt to this film's school-based scenes. Amarcord is not a masterpiece, on par with earlier Fellini classics like Nights Of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, nor 8½, but it is a very good and enjoyable romp, which opened the 1974 Cannes Film Festival and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film that same year.
Reportedly, the proper Italian for `I remember' is `mi ricordo', but Fellini used his own native Romagnolo dialect's version of the term a m'arcòrd, to limn his lost boyhood in the coastal town of Rimini- which is the central character of the film. Regardless, the film he constructed is a very good one, which follows a year in the life of a town and its citizenry- from one spring to the next, although it heralded the weaker and even more loosely constructed films that ended his career. This is the last film that most cineastes even to bother arguing the greatness of. Yet, many of the labels applied to it simply are not correct- it is not surreal, for it is grounded in reality, even as flights of fancy take place; it is not a satire, even though there are satirical elements. The very impulse to always definitively characterize something as this or that, without allowing comfortable straddling of boundaries says more of the flaws of the critic than they do of the film. Also, despite the picaresque nature of the film it does not move too quickly. Most of the famed scenes plat out in seven to ten minute stretches where small details filter into the subconscious without even knowing it....The musical soundtrack, by Nino Rota, is stellar, and the best thing in the film, although the cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno is not far behind, especially in the sunset scene where Uncle Teo is coaxed down from the apple tree and back to the asylum. Yet, Amarcord succeeds because its totality is greater than any of its great to mediocre parts. It may not be a great film, but it is a great display of artistic excellence to marshal such disparate elements into a film that succeeds far more often than it doesn't. Federico Fellini, in this film, shows that he is a great artist, even when his art is not great.

A compassionate, funny, and telling film

2008-09-03
"Amarcord"--"I Remember"--just may be my single favorite Fellini film. I love it for three reasons.

First, it's a warmly nostalgic look at the sometimes buffoonish, sometimes strange, but always lovable figures whom Fellini remembers from his childhood hometown. I don't know how much in the film is a historically loyal depiction and how much is a cocktail of memory and imagination. But it doesn't really matter how accurate Fellini's portraits are, because what he gives us is an ensemble of characters, from his youthful counterpart Titta, to Titta's hot-tempered father Aurelio, to his crazy "I want a woman!" uncle, to the over-aged Don Juans who still have adolscent libidos, to the unforgettable Gradisca and the hilarious town lawyer, who are charming and real. The only other film I can think of that comes close to "Amarcord" in warm nostalgia is Woody Allen's "Radio Days."

Second, the film is genuinely funny, and sometimes absolutely, laugh-out-loud hilarious. The buffoonish black shirts strutting through the dusty streets; the "do you touch yourself?" confession scene; the dinner scene in Titta's household; and the unforgettable scene in which Uncle Teo climbs high in a tree, throws stones, and screams for a woman.

Third: funny as the film is, it's also got a very definite edgy message. Mussolini's blackshirts may've been clownish, but they could also be brutal. The Church may be comical, but it also encourages sexual repression and prolonged adolescence. The aristocracy may be quaint, but it's also decrepit and parasitical (in the opening spring rite scene of the film, the brief visit to the local count's palace is one of the best in the whole movie).

The movie isn't without its troublesome spots. The fantasy scenes that take place in the Grand Hotel seem out of place, and tend to rupture the smalltown ambience the rest of the film creates. In addition, the illness of Miranda is announced too abruptly, with absolutely no preparation, and her death follows quickly. But overall, "I Remember" is a film to remember.

on the nostalgia wings

2008-05-05
It's a sincere documentary of the era it depicts. Excellent in every respect thanks also to Criterion treatment.

Don't give up on this one...

2008-05-03
Movie set in the 1930's in a small town in Italy on the Adriatic. The movie initially feels like a series of disconnected and chaotic sequences that lack structure and direction. But hang in there - it comes together masterfully. The story of the town, a young boy growing up, a family and the community dealing with the fascist regime is filled with colorful and whacky characters. It is wrapped in beautiful spell bounding scenes of dandelion seeds drifting in the wind bringing on the spring season - to a wide-winged peacock mesmerizing the watchers in light snow fall - to a massive new ship approaching crude boats as the town watches on from far below. This is a funny, beautiful, dreamlike movie...

Fellini's Masterpiece

2008-04-15
Fellini's most personal film remains his masterpiece--a rich, beautiful pageant of small town life and an examination of one family that is brimming with funny scenes of fantasy and satire, as well as magical moments of intimate nostalgia and pathos as it moves through the cycle of the seasons.

Doesn't Withstand the Test of Time

2007-11-02
From moment to moment and shot by shot, Amarcord delivers more sheer pleasure than any other Federico Fellini movie. That's not to say it's his greatest film, or that anything in it rivals the emotional, lyrical, or metaphysical wallop of the finest passages in Nights of Cabiria, 8 1/2, La Strada, or even La Dolce Vita, the big early-'60s crossover hit that made the director king of the international film world. But Amarcord was the last clear triumph of Fellini's career, his prodigious gifts for phantasmagoria, amazing fluidity, and gregarious choreography all feeding an emotional core that caught at audiences' heartstrings and carried them away.

One last memory: In 1975 Amarcord received the Oscar for best foreign-language film of 1974. Since the film went into general U.S. release in '75, it was eligible for the Motion Picture Academy to turn around and nominate Fellini again, in '76, for best director and best original screenplay of 1975. He didn't win any further awards, but his repeat appearance in that year's Oscar derby occasioned an exquisite cultural moment: the young Steven Spielberg, realizing that he had not been cited for his direction of Jaws, gasping, "They gave my nomination to Fellini?!" --Richard T. Jameson

Author Cinema 2007-08-02
After two deaths at the end of July (Bergman and Antonioni) one more appreciates the revolution in film language, which took place in the 1960s.
Fellini has a different spot in this era of Film-Becoming-Poetry. In near future his dicoveries would be valued no less than Eisenstein's or Vertov's. In many ways Amarcord (and Rome) is more sofisticated than 8.5, which is constructed around plot (last cry of modernism), when the PoMo (late) Fellini is focusing story around thought-feeling, that is a true existential EVENT. Is possible for a requiem to be humorous?
Dante called it "Divine Comedy" ...
I hardly know any episode that doesn't belong to the poem... I think it is a philosophy piece and, maybe, should be viewed as such.

Amarcord 2007-07-03
This stunning Criterion edition features a newly restored high-definition transfer, along with a grab-bag of first rate extras, including "Fellini's Homecoming", a new documentary exploring the director's complex feelings about his origins. "Amarcord" itself remains unabashedly lewd but also deeply sentimental.Fellini's surreal film memoir won the Best Foreign Film Oscar, and it's easy to see why. With its circus-like feel and an engaging cast of cranks, fools, fanatics, and horny teens, "Amarcord" is a splendid homage to the director's hometown and misspent youth in pre-WWII Italy. But there's also a dark undercurrent, as we sense the Fascist menace slowly impinging on the lives of Titta's relatives. Set to Nino Rota's winsome score, "Amarcord" is a marvelous melange of indelible anecdotes by one of the world's great directors.

Perfect movie - what's with the liner notes? 2007-06-08
Amarcord is one of my all-time favorite movies and this print is even more of a feast for the senses than it was before, due to the latest color remastering technology. The written notes include a short piece by Fellini himself. They also include some obligatory commentary by a Fellini "expert," which is unbelievably poorly written. It reads like a bad college essay, full of words like "mutability" that don't actually mean anything. The author ends by comparing Fellini's theme of ephemerality and irony to "a pheasant in the snow," alluding to a scene in the film. The trouble is, it's a peacock! Has he even WATCHED the movie? -AR

Being Oneself:Always an Act of Creation in Amarcord 2007-05-05
The theme of this story is the compassion that allows close-knit, small-town Italians in the 1930's to lead a meaningful existence in the context of Fascist oppression and economic hardship.
This story is culturally valuable because it shows the beauty of meaningfully existing, unchanged, amid destructive and oppressive forces. When a peacock lands in the snow with its beautiful, vibrant blue and green feathers, it exemplifies beauty, simply existing, within harsh conditions. The point of the story is not that the characters of this small Italian town make any world-altering advances, but rather that they maintain what they already have and admire--their sense of community and individual compassion--despite oppressive odds. Fellini gives his audience mischievous adolescents, oblivious teachers, a "crazy" uncle, a humorous grandfather, an idealistic and extremely feminine beauty, a generous but sickly mother and her easily-angered husband, dissatisfied workers, a story-telling lawyer, a prince, and a lying snack vendor. And none of these characters is ever treated inhumanely, or as being of any less value than any other. The uncle has an episode in which he climbs a tree and throws rocks at people who try to get him down, all the while yelling, "I want a woman!" Hours pass and the doctor who eventually comes to get him down remarks, "He has normal days, and he has not normal days...Just like us." Through the interaction of these characters, Fellini allows his audiences to encounter a town, the families, a community, and the simple life that exists within it. This film is powerful because it is saying that one does not have to defeat oppression to be worthy of being a model, seen and honored. You have only to live, to be yourself--which means to create--to be something powerful and moving.